Compression across base station fiber optic links can save industry up to 25 billion USD

September 08, 2011 //
By Jean-Pierre Joosting

Samplify Systems was granted a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (U.S. Patent #8,005,152) on August 23, 2011 that covers the use of compression across fiber optic links, including those using the CPRI (Common Public Radio Interface) and OBSAI (Open Base Station Architecture Initiative) protocols, within wireless base stations.

"With the deployment of 4G LTE beginning early this year, we have seen wireless operators and equipment vendors become much more sensitive to the rising deployment costs for both macro-cell and distributed base stations," says Tom Sparkman, CEO of Samplify. "Wireless operators will benefit from our Prism IQ™ compression technology from multiple equipment vendors which we believe can save as much as $25B in the deployment of 4G LTE."

This patent enhances Samplify's patent portfolio for its cost-saving compression technology and strengthens the company's existing utility patent in China (#CN20092017851.0) granted in August of 2010.

With 4G LTE, the capacity of fiber optic connections using CPRI and OBSAI between remote radio heads and baseband units increases from 614 Mbps to 10 Gbps. To support this faster speed, more expensive optical transceivers and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are required at each end of the fiber link.

For distributed base stations, using centralized baseband processors and metropolitan-area fiber to connect to radio units, the operating costs associated with 10 Gbps wavelength services are many thousands of dollars per month. In fact, Bell Labs estimates that in 2010, wireless operators spent over $200B on capital and operating costs for their existing networks. As operators roll out 4G, these costs will only escalate.

Samplify has been researching signal compression since 1999. The company's Prism IQ compression technology has continually been optimized specifically for critically sampled I/Q baseband data to support increased bandwidth demands by wireless networks. Given this legacy, the mobile industry can be assured that Prism IQ delivers the highest performing compression technology available for wireless infrastructure applications, achieving up to 4:1 compression on 4G LTE signals while maintaining signal quality in terms of error vector magnitude prescribed by 3GPP.

Prism IQ is available from Samplify to wireless equipment companies as intellectual property for FPGAs and ASICs.